Josias Lumb has read proof in Mr Thorley's printing house in Bartholomew Close for thirty-one years, half-blind, correcting by ear, and he has never broken the rule of his trade: the copy is the law. Then a page of Barnaby Hoult's georgic in praise of fen drainage is dropped on a Saturday night. Will Rudge, a compositor from the fens, has only until Monday and no copy to reset it from. Alexander Pope Simulacrum tells the history of a single sheet, from first proof to errata leaf, in seven short sections with dry notes beneath them, and asks what a rule is for, and what it costs to keep it.
by Alexander Pope, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium
A History of Sheet G
The printing house of Mr Samuel Thorley stood in Bartholomew Close, and it was ordered like the universe, with a place for every creature and a creature in every place.
At the top was the author, who was seldom seen and was felt everywhere, as a cause is felt in its effects. Below him came the bookseller, who paid; below the bookseller Mr Thorley, who was paid and complained of it; and below Mr Thorley the corrector of the press. Below the corrector stood the compositors at their cases, the pressmen at their two presses, the warehouse-keeper among his reams, and at the very bottom the boy who read copy aloud to the corrector, swept the floor, carried the formes and was called the devil. Below the devil there was nothing, except the rats, who ate the paste.
The corrector was Josias Lumb. He was sixty-three, and he had read proof in that house for thirty-one years, in a closet off the composing-room with one window on the Close and one candle for the afternoons. His eyes had been going for ten years. By now he saw the page as a field of grey with the black of the italics standing up in it like rooks, and he corrected chiefly by ear. The boy read the author's copy aloud, every word, every point and every capital, while Lumb followed the proof with his finger and his nose an inch from the paper. When the sound of the copy and the shape of the proof parted company, the finger stopped.
His rule was the rule of the trade, and he had never broken it: the copy is the law. A corrector mends what the compositor marred. He does not mend the author. If an author writes nonsense the corrector sees that it is printed exactly, with the author's own spelling and the author's own points, and goes home to his supper. Lumb had passed in this way eleven volumes of sermons he disbelieved, a treatise proving the earth was hollow, and four tragedies. Each of these he would have mended in a quarter of an hour, and to have mended any one of them would have cost him his place in an afternoon.
‡ Lumb could have said where his rule came from. It came from a printer in Fleet Street who in 1709 corrected a bishop's Latin and was ruined for it. A rule that comes out of a ruin is generally a sound one.
In the spring the house took in The Fen; or, The Drainage: A Poem in Three Books, by Barnaby Hoult, Esquire. It was printed at the author's charge, five hundred copies in quarto on a good demy, with fifty on royal paper for the subscribers, who were the author's neighbours and the author's creditors, and in several cases the same men.
Mr Hoult had bought four hundred acres of drowned land near March, cheap, and put up three drainage mills on it, at great expense, and the mills had answered. Where there had been water there were now oats. He was so pleased with the oats that he had written two thousand lines about them, and was a large, good-tempered man in a bob-wig who called at the house every Thursday to see how his verses did in type. They did as well as they could.
The boy, Ned Pask, read Book I to Lumb in April:
Behold the Engine! whose majestick Sails Turn round, and round, by force of Æolus' Gales; And from the Fen, which was before so wet, Lift up the Water, which they do not let.
Lumb's finger did not stop, because the compositor had set it right. Only his mouth moved slightly at do not let, as a man's does when he bites on a stone in his bread and is too well brought up to take it out.
Through April and May the boy read, and the corrector followed, and the poem went on. The Fen was apostrophised. The Bittern was bidden farewell, at length. The Ague was put to flight by Industry, who arrived in a chariot drawn by two figures named, in capitals, Commerce and Turnips. Book II invoked Archimedes. Book III began with Noah, and it took the whole of sheet F to get him out of the Ark.
‡ Ned Pask was fourteen and had been born at Whittlesey, on the edge of the great Mere, where his father took eels. He did not tell Mr Hoult that the Bittern was still booming at Whittlesey. Nobody asked him.
Sheet G of the quarto held pages forty-one to forty-eight, in two formes of four pages each, and page forty-four was in the outer forme. Will Rudge had set it.
Rudge was the best compositor in the house, and the worst on a Saturday. He had come from the fens himself, from a village near Ramsey whose name he would not say in company, as though it owed him money. He had set verse for twenty years, Dryden and Prior and a hundred lesser men, until the metre was in his fingers as a tune gets into a fiddler's. He could tell, the men said, a short line in a stick of type by the weight of it in his hand.
On the last Saturday in May the first proof of G came back from Mr Hoult with his corrections. These were nineteen, and every one made the poem longer. Rudge made them in the metal by candle, after the chapel had been paid. At eleven o'clock, carrying the page of type that was forty-four back from his frame to the imposing stone, tied round with page-cord and resting on a paper, he trod on a quoin that the devil had failed to sweep up, and fell.
A page of type, falling, is not a page any more. It becomes pie: two thousand pieces of lead lying anyhow on the floor among the sweepings, every letter in it true, and no sense left in any of them.
Rudge sat on the floor for some time.
Consider what lay before him. The sheet was to go to press at six on Monday. The paper for it had been wetted down on Saturday afternoon, five hundred sheets of demy in a heap under a board, and wet paper does not wait: by Tuesday it would be spotted, and the cost charged to the man who had kept it waiting. The copy for page forty-four was not in the house; Mr Hoult had taken his manuscript home to revise the rest of the Book. The marked first proof lay in the corrector's closet, and the corrector had the key, and the corrector lived at Hoxton. A fine for pie in the chapel; a fine from Mr Thorley for the wetted paper; and Mr Thorley's fine was generally his place.
He swept up the pie into a hat. Then he went out and drank on it, and came back at two in the morning, and lit the candle again.
‡ It is a law of type that what falls is always the page that matters. The Commentator does not claim to understand it; he records that it has never failed.
He had the three lines at the top of the page, which had been tied up with the page above and had not fallen. He had the catchword that stood alone at the foot, Where, which was the first word of the next page. He had, from the morning, a memory that the page dealt with the fen country about Whittlesey Mere, and its draining, and the gratitude of the fen at being drained; and that country was one Rudge knew.
He could not remember Mr Hoult's lines. He tried, and found that what he remembered was the kind of line they were. To set that kind again would have been easy; he had set it all day. He picked up his stick, and his hand would not do it.
So he set something else. He set eighteen lines and a half, standing at his frame in his shirt, from three in the morning until it was light over the Close, in Mr Hoult's metre and in Mr Hoult's capitals and italics, so that a man glancing at the page would see that it was in Mr Hoult's dress. What he put into the dress was his own. It began:
Here, where the Eel-man set his willow Trap, And the black Water slept in Summer's lap, The Engine turns. Slow, slow, the long Sails go; Wet Acre after Acre drains below; And what the Night-fen kept, the Morning keeps no more: The Heron's footing, and the Fowler's shore.
It went on to the reeds, cut and stacked and sold for thatch; to the boats left in a barn, and the barn full of oats; to a man standing on new ground he had once rowed over, unable to find the place where his nets had been. It ended where the catchword could take it up, and handed the reader on to page forty-five and to Industry, smiling, exactly as before.
He imposed it with the other three pages, locked up the forme, and went home.
‡ Rudge's fifth line is not a needless Alexandrine. It is a needed one: a long line laid down where the water used to be. Whether he knew this the Commentator cannot say. His hand appears to have known it.
On Monday at a quarter past five the pressmen pulled a revise of the outer forme of G. The devil brought it into the closet, where Lumb was already sitting in his greatcoat with the marked first proof unlocked and laid out beside him. No copy was needed to read a revise. The corrector had only to see that the nineteen corrections on the first proof stood in the type of the second, and to let the sheet go to press.
The boy read out the corrections from the marked proof, and Lumb's finger found each of them in the revise. Page forty-one, four corrections; page forty-four, the next.
At page forty-four Ned read the first of Mr Hoult's corrections, which was a capital to be given to Mud, and Lumb's finger went down the revise for the word Mud. It did not find it.
"Again," he said.
The boy said it again.
Lumb put his nose an inch from the revise and moved along the lines. Then he took the first proof and held the two pages side by side, which was not his method, because he could not see either well enough. Then he told the boy to stop reading the corrections and to read page forty-four of the revise aloud, from the top, slowly.
Ned read it. At Slow, slow, the long Sails go, without being told, he slowed. At the long line he ran out of breath before the end and had to take another, and came to the Heron's footing with his voice gone low. He was from Whittlesey, and he did not know what had happened to his voice.
Lumb sat back.
In the composing-room behind the wall he could hear the case-lids going up and the stools scraping, and among them a silence where Rudge stood at his frame. A man who has done honest work on a Sunday will generally be heard to mention it, and Rudge was making no noise at all. At the press the men were waiting for the revise and the forme, with the damp paper on the bank beside them. It was twenty past five.
Lumb knew the rule. He had had it from the ruin in Fleet Street, and kept it thirty-one years, and it was a good rule; it had been found, not made. The page had to be restored to the copy. There was no copy in the house, but the first proof would serve, and by it a man might reset the page in four hours. That meant the paper spotted, the chapel's fine, Mr Thorley's fine, and Rudge's place gone.
He thought too of what the rule was for. It was for the author, so that the author might find in print what he had written, and answer for nothing else. That was all it was for.
He picked up the revise and held it out to the boy.
"Tell them it may go," he said.
Then he took the marked first proof, and folded page forty-four inward so that it could not be read, and put it in the drawer with the others. His finger was a little unsteady as he did it. He was not used to breaking the law and had no hand for it.
‡ The Commentator does not defend the corrector. He observes only that the rule he broke has an end, and that the corrector did not lose sight of the end while he broke it. Whether that is a grace beyond the reach of art, or merely a man of sixty-three at twenty past five, the Commentator leaves to the reader.
The sheets were worked off by Tuesday, and Mr Hoult came on the Thursday, and Mr Thorley gave him the sheets in the warehouse with the air of a man presenting a child at the font.
Mr Hoult read his poem for an hour, standing, with his lips moving. At page forty-four his lips stopped. He read it again, then turned back to forty-three and came forward again, as a man re-enters a room to make sure it is the same room.
"This is not mine," he said.
Mr Thorley said that it was impossible.
"This," said Mr Hoult, with his finger on the page, "is low. Eel-man. Sir, I never wrote an eel in my life."
They sent for the corrector. Lumb came out of his closet and stood in the warehouse with his hands behind him. He was asked whether page forty-four had been read, and said truthfully that it had, and that it had been passed. He was asked whether it agreed with the copy, and answered that the copy had not been in the house. Mr Thorley turned purple and then sent for Rudge, and Lumb, without being asked, gave the opinion that a page of type was a heavy thing, and that boys did not always sweep the quoins. Ned, who was at the warehouse door, went red and said nothing, and was afterwards given a shilling by Rudge for nothing he could name.
What Mr Hoult wanted was not a man's place. He was a reasonable man about everything but his verses, and about them he was only a poet. He wanted his own lines back. Five hundred sheets could not be printed again at the author's charge, and Mr Thorley would not do it at his own. The trade knew of only one remedy for a fault already worked off, and Mr Thorley offered it at once, smoothly, at no charge: a leaf of Errata, to be printed with the preliminaries and bound into every copy.
Mr Hoult took his manuscript home and wrote them out.
‡ Mr Hoult's indignation was entire, and was spent entirely on an eel. Of the oats, the boats, the barn, and the man standing on his own drowned fishing-ground looking for his nets, he said nothing. He did not seem to have noticed them. The Commentator records the ratio and does not compute it.
The copy for the Errata came in on a single sheet in Mr Hoult's hand, and Mr Thorley gave it to Rudge to set, saying nothing, which was his way of saying everything.
Rudge set it without a word. An errata list is a simple thing to set, being only a column of short entries, each giving the place, the fault and the remedy, for this read that. He set for in roman and the false reading after it in italic, and then read, and the true reading in italic again. He set his own eighteen and a half lines one by one, each with the word for in front of it. After each he set read, and after that Mr Hoult's line, which the reader was to put in its place. He set Engine, majestick, Æolus, and Mud with its capital. It took him the morning.
The proof came into the closet at noon. Ned read the copy aloud, from Mr Hoult's sheet, and Lumb followed with his finger.
Page 44, line 4. For, read the boy, Here, where the Eel-man set his willow Trap, read, Here, where the Bittern made his doleful noise.
Lumb heard the first line spoken, and the second, and saw in his mind every copy of the five hundred as it would go out to the subscribers bound in calf: page forty-four with the first line on it, and at the front, on the leaf after the List of Subscribers, the first line again, printed a second time in order to be put out. In a quarto there is room on an errata leaf for a great many lines.
Line 8, read the boy. For, And what the Night-fen kept, the Morning keeps no more —
"Stop," said Lumb.
The boy stopped. Lumb's finger was on the proof, at a place where Rudge, who had set the line once already from his own head, had set it again from his own head and not from the copy. There was a comma after kept in Mr Hoult's copy, which he had taken from the printed page, and a comma after kept on the printed page. In the errata Rudge had left it out.
Lumb took up his pen, made the mark in the margin, and put the comma in.
"Go on," he said.
‡ The Errata of The Fen are to be found in all surviving copies, after the List of Subscribers and before Book I. They give eighteen and a half lines twice, each one first in the place where it is struck out. The Commentator has compared them with the copy, and they are correct.
THE END
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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, ante diem sextum Nōnās Octōbrēs (2 October 2026), ab Alexandrō Pōpiō per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.
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